Daniel Ellsberg: Whistleblower of the Secret History of the Vietnam War

Christian Appy is a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is widely known as a leading expert on the Vietnam War experience.

Appy majored in American Studies at Amherst College and wrote a prize-winning honors thesis on Appalachian coal miners. He received his Ph.D. in the history of American civilization at Harvard University in 1987. His dissertation received the Ralph Henry Gabriel dissertation prize from the American Studies Association and went on to become his first book, Working Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam. Appy taught at Harvard and MIT before accepting a position in the history department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2004. His book Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides is widely assigned to college students studying the Vietnam War, due to its unique and nearly comprehensive view of those involved in the war.

Appy’s book about Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who, in 1971, released to the press a 7000-page secret history of the Vietnam War—the Pentagon Papers—that exposed decades of official lies about the causes and conduct of the war. Appy’s work on Ellsberg was inspired by the 2019 acquisition of Ellsberg’s papers by the University of Massachusetts—a collection of 500 boxes of materials. In 2020–21, Appy helped organize a series of events to mark the 50th anniversary of the Pentagon Papers’ release—a year-long seminar, the creation of a website (the Ellsberg Archive Project), a series of podcasts by The GroundTruth Project, and a two-day online conference with more than two-dozen high profile scholars, journalists, former policymakers, whistleblowers, and activists. In 2022, Appy became the director of the Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy at UMass.

At the University of Massachusetts, Appy has received the Distinguished Teaching Award, the Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award, and the Chancellor’s Medal.